A View From The Factory Floor BY Larry Calloway In the last half of his 30 years representing New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, Jeff Bingaman saw dysfunction of Congress go tactical and political, beginning in 1995 under then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and continuing under Mitch McConnell whenever he was Senate majority leader. Both are …
How the Union army continued west after the Civil War. Reviews of “Lakota America” by Pekka Hamalainen and “West from Appomattox” by Heather Cox Richardson————————————————— The Dec. 5 (2020) New Yorker has drawn attention to Pekka Hamalainen, the Danish scholar of American Indian policy. Here is my review of his first book, “Lakota America.” …
The Winning of the West and the Theft of Mt. Rushmore Read More »
I recall the day at St. John’s College Santa Fe when news reached the Western world that the Taliban had blown up the two standing Buddhas carved in a cliff in the Bamiyan valley of Afghanistan. We had been reading Buddhist literature as part of the St. John’s College Eastern Classics program, and as …
This new interpretation of Spinoza, the persecuted 17th century advocate of scientific thinking, constructs an alternative to religious faith that goes beyond negative atheism. Clare Carlisle draws from his philosophy a concept of living “in God.” It suggests, in her words, “the possibility of an immediate, non-dualist awareness of being-in-God, which perhaps resembles the kind of …
The neo-cons in the George W. Bush administration never documented what they owed to Leo Strauss. All I recall is that they claimed to have been students of philosophy under the brilliant refugee from Nazi Germany. By mere association with these U.S. politicians he has been “accused,” according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of …
THE MILLENNIUM began at midnight in Australia with a blazing word on the Sydney harbor bridge: “Eternity” in a flowing script called copperplate. What was it supposed to mean? By then Aussies — but few of the global TV watchers — knew the story behind it. There was a writer — Arthur Stace …
In the golf comedy “Caddyshack” Bill Murray, playing the blundering groundskeeper, brags: “I caddied for the Dalai Lama.” Doug Preston, a Santa Fe writer, can say, “I rode a ski lift with the Dalai Lama.” But it’s no laff line. It’s true. His reminiscence in Slate releases a flood of links on Google if you …
I RECALL Professor Charles Nilon, teaching a class in modern novels at Boulder, identified Ernest Hemingway as “an American gentleman.” The memory surfaced as I watched the first episode of the Ken Burns documentary on PBS. Like a British noble, Hemingway toured the colonies, hunted trophy animals, behaved well in military combat, was a sportsman …
“Klara And The Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro is a tale told by a robot living — if that is the right word — in an AI-governed dystopia where automatons imitate humans and ambitious parents submit their children to “genetic editing” for success in the vicious meritocracy. She (Klara) is an “AF” (artificial friend) bought like …
Myra Ellen Jenkins would be happy she is not alive now. There is such a thing as living too long. I wrote in the 1980’s about her involvement as New Mexico state historian in the first controversy over the historic obelisk in the center of the Santa Fe Plaza. It was all about a word. …
